Posted
by
kdawson
on Friday October 09, 2009 @08:32AM
from the is-that-a-nuke-in-your-pocket dept.

pickens writes "Nuclear batteries that produce energy from the decay of radioisotopes are an attractive proposition for many applications because the isotopes that power them can provide a useful amount of current for hundreds of years at power densities a million times as high as standard batteries. Nuclear batteries have been used for military and aerospace applications for years, their large size has limited their general usage. But now a research team at the University of Missouri has developed a nuclear battery the size of a penny that could be used to power micro- and nano-electromechanical systems. The researchers' innovation is not only in the battery's size, but also that the batteries use a liquid semiconductor rather than a solid semiconductor. 'The critical part of using a radioactive battery is that when you harvest the energy, part of the radiation energy can damage the lattice structure of the solid semiconductor,' says Jae Wan Kwon. 'By using a liquid semiconductor, we believe we can minimize that problem.' The batteries are safe under normal operating conditions. 'People hear the word "nuclear" and think of something very dangerous,' says Kwon. 'However, nuclear power sources have already been safely powering a variety of devices, such as pacemakers, space satellites, and underwater systems.'"

I know this a joke, but it does remind me of something. One of the arguments that people on the far right have tried to use to convince the public that Iran is trying to build bombs and not energy is: "Iran has so much oil, why would they care about nuclear energy?"

Easy, sherlock... they aren't going to have oil forever. Iran might be thinking ahead. They might not want to make the same mistake that the U.S. made it comes to oil dependency.

Iran has crude oil. What they *don't* have is gasoline...fuel oil...asphalt...and so on. Iran has very little in the way of refining capability (it didn't help that a large chunk of their refineries got blown up in the Iraq-Iran war). In fact, one of the sanctions that's been discussed for Iran is cutting off their gasoline supply.

One correction: Ahmadinejad is not a theocratic dictator. In fact he's neither theocratic nor a dictator. He's a civil servant and a pandering politician with very little power. The real power lies with the revolutionary guard and the Supreme Leader. He's a theocratic dictator.

First off, you can use either light or heavy water reactor to make plutonium, it makes little difference except that a short cycle (typical but not necessary of heavy water reactors) makes better plutonium.

Enrichment is necessary for light water but not heavy water, although it can be economically beneficial for a heavy water reactor.

Heavy water reactors are no bigger, except that the capital costs makes large ones more viable.

Not to long ago they didn't have any capacity to build any nuclear facilities, now they have plenty of capacity. If they managed to get from zero to nuclear power in such a short term, why can't they get their oil industry back on line again? I doubt everyone knowing anything about oil refinery have fled the country, or died in the war with Iraq.

"To provide enough power, we need certain methods with high energy density," said Jae Kwon, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at MU. "The radioisotope battery can provide power density that is six orders of magnitude higher than chemical batteries."

They misspoke or were written down wrong. Six orders of magnitude more power density than chemical batteries wouldn't be a battery. It'd be a bomb. Further evidence toward a mistake is that they were just talking about "high energy density".

Easy, sherlock... they aren't going to have oil forever. Iran might be thinking ahead. They might not want to make the same mistake that the U.S. made it comes to oil dependency.

Or, they could figure that it's bloody stupid to burn their own oil for power when they could sell it on the market as global supplies dwindle and/or demand rises. Better to use nuclear to generate electricity and use the fossil fuels to provide revenue for the future.

Having said that, I still think that Iran's program is to make a bomb...

Nahh, having a bomb is really a fringe benefit. Pakistan has bombs, North Korea has bombs, and it doesn't stop those countries from being shit-holes. Having a bomb does not immediately confer upon you God-like abilities. Though it does tend to make warmongering politicians pause a little.

Iran would rather have our wealth by maximizing sale of crude, and keep on exporting oil. Hell when oil was at $15

Oh I agree. Having a bomb-making capability is certainly a fringe benefit. However in today's energy-starved world, nuclear power makes sense for ANY nation, and ESPECIALLY for an oil exporting nation. Because if they end up consuming their own exports, what ELSE are they going to export? Sand? Dates?

There is a valid argument for a nuclear powered Iran without even considering nuclear weapons. But, as you said, having some would certainly be a bonus.

You know, maybe we need a new word for nuclear. A good old rebranding like corporations do when their name is now met with general public distrust (regardless if the distrust is warranted). We can still call all bombs nuclear, but from now on we should use the term Hydro-Exothermic power plants to describe new power plants. Or something that makes people think of steam instead of ZOMG radiation and bombs.

Nuclear materials usually are not very dangerous for their nuclear properties. For most nuclear materials your skin is all the protection you need. You can get irradiated if you ingest it, which is how Nuclear medicines intnetionally work. But in many cases nuclear materials like Plutonium are more toxic as chemicals then they are dangerous as radioactive materials. You would not intentionally eat battery acid either, and evidently people don't do it accidentally very often either. The death rate from plutonium ingestion would presumably be about the same as the death rate from people ingesting car batteries.

The upside of nuclear materials is that unlike trace chemical contamination, which is hard to find and hard to clean up (e.g. think ancient leaking service station gas tanks contaminating well water), nuclear contamination is easy to find, easy to trace and easy to know when you have cleaned it all up.

would a single hundred year nuclear battery be less harmful to the enviroment or humans than a hundred years of mercury cadmium telluride hearing aid batteries and all the waste products to mine, produce and transport them?

... saying that Chernobyl only happened because of stupidity doesn't make the problem go away. In fact, if Chernobyl failed because of some technical flaw that would actually be easier to fix. Human stupidity isn't. If nuclear plants start proliferating in third world countries, the chance of another Chernobyl becomes likely.

Then I guess you should rejoice. Chernobyl failed due to a technical flaw that allowed human stupidity to cause the melt down. The flaw was fundemental to Chernobyl's design. Chernobyl

Actually I bet this is a based on beta emissions and not heat. So it is basically a direct radiation to electricity conversion. You could use tritium as the source or any other beta emitter.If it is I don't know if I would want it implated in a pace maker. All the common beta emitters are things you really don't want in you system. They are all biologically active.

But since nuclear fusion is a dream unachievable outside mathematical formulas, billion dollar labs where they can produce a picogram or so of new stuff, and THE SUN, I doubt that it's going to happen anytime soon.

The usual suspects [wikipedia.org] are already against it, regardless of whether the tech is viable or not... and in this case the said usual suspects only have to yell "Nuclear Threat!!" to an already scared population to keep this off your roadways, forever... whether its a valid fear or not [wikipedia.org]

IF they're talking about an RTG, I'd rule that right out. I'm not fond of the idea of every car in the country carrying hundreds of kilograms of highly radioactive isotopes around when manufacturing defects are inevitable and there are 6.3 million car crashes and 260,000 car fires every year.

On the other hand, it sounds like what they're describing is actually betavoltaics (God, I hate it when science articles are this vague...). If that's the case, no big deal. Betavoltaics use tritium as the fuel, and tritium is less dangerous than, say, the lead in your lead-acid battery. It's a very weak radiation (can't penetrate skin, doesn't go very far through air), and when ingested, the tritium (generally being in the form of water) has a very short residency in the body.

The problem with scaling up betavoltaics is supply. How can you supply that much tritium in any remotely affordable manner? It just doesn't seem plausible.

Screw that. I can fit a car inside my house, so why not a couple stacks of these that take up 2 regrigerator spaces in the basement?
I don't care if they're dime sized, for home use they could be car battery sized.

It would be great to replace the power packs of everything with them, but they are currently rated in nanoamps of output and microvolts of potential. Scaling them up (and making them cost less than $1 million for a AA cell) is the challenge and its a big one that will take a lot of work.

Shielding isn't a big problem incidentally.From other articles one of the popular nuclear sources is tritium which is used on gunsights and stairwell markings. Half life is pretty short and shielding level required is skin

A power source that lasts forever is suddenly not very useful if it only delivers a few milliwatts. I can see its uses, but it won't be replacing lithium ion batteries in phones and laptops any time soon.

I got modded "funny" for proposing a scenario where a guy contaminates everything he touches because he disassembled one of these types of battery.

They found traces of Po210 *everywhere* in the case of Litvinenko, even on the plane the assassin flew in. The assassin was trained in how to handle Po210 so he wouldn't kill himself yet he left traces of Po210 all the way from Moscow.

I know there are Po210 based anti-static brushes that professional photographers use. These are sealed, and your typical mouthbr

The problem is that normal people are fucking stupid. Imagine the shitstorm when someone disassembles one of these to "see what's inside."

--
BMO

Saying that is like implying that everything is intrinsically safe, and it's humans which will invariably mess things up just because it's possible. In a way you're right, people will do stupid things regardless, but things are designed/exist as (less) safer than other things. Guns kill people under normal conditions, knives cut people under normal conditions, tear gas aggrivates parts of peoples' eyes under normal conditions.

Glow in the dark toys and stickers, as well as watches with phosphorescent hands, contain radioactive isotopes (mainly thorium). The amount of radioactive material in those batteries is likely on par with the aforementioned items. Remember that the intended use for those is to power extremely tiny devices that need to operate constantly, not to replace AA batteries, so the required amount of power is very small.

You mean like some stupid person decides to order a ton of smoke detectors, remove all the Americium, and build himself a reactor in his back yard. That would NEVER happen [wikipedia.org]. Well, only with a stupid person. Never an Eagle scout. Never ever.

Actually cleaning up low level radiation like this isn't that hard. Plus you can tell when your done or not with a geiger counter.

There's already radioactive material in many electronics such as fire alarms. A link [digitalspy.co.uk] Not the most technical link, but it think it captures the spirit of the problem. And it contains a fun quote "If your smoke alarm is on fire you have bigger things to worry about"

When you've only got 33,000 atoms decaying per second, it's well below the threshold of being able to power something. The Americium isn't even powering anything. It's there to trigger an SCR latch powered by a 9v battery.

This is something far different. I don't feel like doing the math, but scaling this up to 50 watts to power a laptop is going to require more oomph than what's in a gamma ray smoke detector.

One of the things that always stuck out at me was the mini nuclear batteries in the Foundation series of books. I had just assumed such things were impossible and were just and artifact of the time the books were written in. Apparently my imagination just wasn't flexible enough.

Good, and now let me actually have a cellular phone that can actually be powered for 100s of years. Because I'm tired of these news articles that claim some new more powerful battery is invented. Batteries are NOT more powerful until I see a cellular phone that can run for months. Cellular phones today do NOT run any longer than 15 years ago so every of the so MANY articles about better batteries I've seen are all just lies. Plain damn LIES.

Yeah, this isn't even close to accurate. Nuclear chain-reactions only occur under a very specific set of conditions, and some guy with a sledgehammer doesn't come close to qualifying.

I know you were half joking and not entirely serious, but it's this sort of ignorance that the idiotic population cling to as an argument not to use nuclear power, thereby holding us back for decades in using a plentiful, clean, and efficient source of power.

Of course, the same idiots that hate the pollution produced by coal po

The "problem" is that the current would not be variable. The amount of electrons produced would be consistent (or perhaps slowly reduce as the elements decay). The article says that it contains a "million times as much charge as standard batteries". True, but it might take 100 years of decay to produce those electrons.So this would be fine for something that draws a consistent amount of current, like a wristwatch (not counting the backlight), but for most applications this power source would have to be coupled with an actual battery or capacitor to store the continuously emitted electrons for use on demand, or to provide bursts of current, etc.

So this would be more like a trickle battery charger than an actual battery.

According to http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/10/liquid-nuclear-battery-that-could-have.html, which quotes the published paper, the battery provides 16.2 nW, has open-circuit voltage of 899 mV, and short-circuit current of 107.4 nA. When they talk about micro- and nano-mechanical applications, they're not kidding. It would take a stack of 61,728,395 of them to provide 1 watt.

There are a number of niche applications where this could be incredibly useful. As others have said, pacemakers and other implanted or critical medical devices (I'm thinking defibrillators), but also emergency lighting and well, pretty much anything that has a larger, traditional battery pack that has to be trickle charged.

A fairly obvious application would be long-life smoke detectors, since they already contain radioactive materials. You could stick one up on a vaulted ceiling and forget about it for 10 years...

Ok, maybe I'm jumping the gun on this one, but in a recent/. article about phones not having enough battery life, I sort of tongue-in-cheek proposed atomic batteries [slashdot.org] for powering the phones. Maybe I'm not so far off the mark?

I'm not sure though - these batteries might not provide sufficiently high wattage to power the phones? Still, maybe you could have self-recharging cell phones? Couple one or two of these small atomic batteries with something more conventional, like Li-ions, (or, in the future, perhaps

'However, nuclear power sources have already been safely powering a variety of devices, such as pacemakers, space satellites, and underwater systems.'"

If this quote even reaches only one anti-nuclear nutjob and opens their eyes, just a little, to the benefits that nuclear energy can provide when handled safely and appropriately, then the world will be a slightly better place. This message needs to get spread around and stated by every single physicist, engineer, mathematician, and wrench monkey that works in any field associated with nuclear energy. It needs to be stated in every single press conference, peer-reviewed journal, and twitter feed by anyone talking about the subject that has any authority. Simply by throwing this short little blip into his discussion, Jae Wan Kwon has already earned more respect in my eyes than Michio Kaku...

You know, this sounds distinctly like the sort of power sources that were ubiquitous in a lot of Asimov's sci-fi, e.g., the foundation series. When I was reading that, I noted that he clearly thought that shortly everything in society would run on nuclear power. In one book, they even talked about the decay of a society until, gasp!, they went back to primitive fossil fuels. I figure that irrational fear of nuclear power and radiation is one reason why this has not come to pass, but maybe now it will.

Something that produces energy from the decay of radioisotopes is called a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG) whereas a battery is an array of electrochemical cells for electricity storage.

3 Mile Island and more recently Chernobyl have our society so afraid of nuclear power, the dreaded China syndrome, that regardless of how safe it becomes we will refuse to adopt it.

RTG technology is the safest way to produce energy and the greenest energy known to man. It takes something that would otherwise be dangerous and turns it into something productive. NASA uses this technology to power space probes, Voyager-1 is still being powered by one today, and will continue to do so until the year 2025. Plutonium 238 is the best fuel for a RTG, because of its long half-life and the fact that it cannot (yes CANNOT) sustain a chain reaction is somehow any of it started to fuse.

I looked into this technology when I built a mini robotic submarine in graduate school. But, that's when I found out two things: 1) I would have to submit to an anal probe before the Nuclear Regulatory Commiseration (NRC) would denied me the right to posses any more radioactive material than can be found in about 3 smoke detectors and 2) The room, labeled radioactive storage, in the Science building, where I attended University, with the big yellow radioactive sign is there to impress benefactors and since it lacks a smoke detector contains no radioactive material (LOL).

Improvements in power generation from nuclear fuel has become pretty safe over the last few years. Pebble bed reactor technology can theoretically remain stable indefinitely even without external cooling, though I don't think that has been put to the test. But, to be a viable energy solution a country really needs to adopt this method on mass because each reactor can only power a portion of a city so to be a major benefit a country would have one of these in everyone's backyard. RTG technology is even safer. It generates energy from the heat that occurs from the natural decay of a nuclear fuel.

If I could get my hands on say an ounce of Pu 238 I could build a RTG that would power my home, all my vehicles, and enable me to quit my job and live of the check my local electricity provider would have to pay me for the excess power I would generate. It would generate full power for ~ 87 years and not only wold I be using the greenest power available I would be providing a community service of disposing of a radioactive material.

But, echelon might flag me for even writing this post (looks around nervously)... The irrational fear of a China Syndrome scenario combined with the recent dose of terrorism (fear of dirty bombs) would never allow me to build one, even if I was a nuclear scientist, which I am not.

So, make an inventory of the smoke detectors you own. If the total is above 3 then you are in possession of enough nuclear material that would require you to get a license from the NRC. If you don't have a license from the NRC and own more than 3 smoke detectors you are likely in possession of an illegal amount of barium and could be flagged as an enemy combative and thanks to George W. Bush enemy combative have no right to any legal representation and can be summarily executed or detained for an indefinite amount of time without even informing anyone that they took you into custody.

"So, make an inventory of the smoke detectors you own. If the total is above 3 then you are in possession of enough nuclear material that would require you to get a license from the NRC. If you don't have a license from the NRC and own more than 3 smoke detectors you are likely in possession of an illegal amount of barium and could be flagged as an enemy combative and thanks to George W. Bush enemy combative have no right to any legal representation and can be summarily executed or detained for an indefinit

They really need to declassify Beta Decay Isotoped lighter than Iron as Dangerous or terrorist materials. Beta Decay is pretty damned harmless and you cannot use it to 'Breed" other nuclear materials like you can with Neutron/Gamma/ or even alpha decay sources. Also if the decay substance is an element lighter than iron you cannot get any usable energy out of it if it Fissions. You can only get energy out of it by having the neutrons decay into Protons and eject a electron. (electricity which can be used)

Electrons will never get inside the core of another atom to change the atomic structure and therefor are not useful at all when it comes to making inert elements radioactive.

Maybe we could make large Nuclear waste processing plants that use heavy volatile elements that gamma or neutron decay to breed large amounts of light elements that beta decay, then ship the material to regional "power plants" that are nothing more than large Light element Nuclear RTG/Beta batteries.

The greenie weenies would never stand to let such a project be built because they are weenies.

Battery disposal is the first thing that comes to mind (as well as the "idiot throwing one into a fire" that come up above these comments), however if you create batteries that last A LOT longer, doesn't disposal become *less* of a problem? It doesn't go away, but if the batteries last as long as advertised doesn't it mean we need a lot less space to store the waste (but the waste might be a heck of a lot more toxic)?